Month: March 2015

Honestly, answer it. Here are a couple beautiful photos my friend Ty took to enjoy while you think about it:

This photo casts serious doubt on whether I belong in the backcountry. (That’s me doing “the walrus” up on to a redrock ledge in The Maze last January.)A night camped on the Green River means pooping in bags and packing it out. Do you have what it takes?

What did you answer? And what did you take “people like you” to mean?

Your answer might depend on who you see represented in ads for outdoor brands, or in films at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, or who you see out on trails.

Or how often you yourself get outside.

There are lots of reasons some groups get out and enjoy nature more than others, which are beyond the scope of this post, but one factor is income (which is, of course, connected to many other factors). If you don’t have the money for a car (or gas, or gear) or the time off of a low-paying job, it can be hard to take your family to the nearest national park or wilderness area. If you’re not very healthy, or you have a hard enough time with daily life, the idea of tackling an optional challenge – physical exertion in a strange new place – may seem like a luxury.

And if you never have been out hiking, it’s sure hard to imagine yourself doing it. One way to solve that is to give more people (kids, families, everyone) the opportunity to leave the city and experience nature.

You think we’re going to climb down WHAT to get to that river?

I volunteer with an organization through the Sierra Club, that recently changed its name from the 30 year old “Inner City Outings” to “Inspiring Connections Outdoors,” but the goal of the all-volunteer nonprofit is to give kids an opportunity to experience nature who might otherwise not get out of the city. Volunteers who have passed background checks and been trained in outdoor skills and first aid partner with Title I Schools, halfway houses, and other groups that work with at-risk and underprivileged youth to provide opportunities to go hiking, caving, camping, and stargazing.

The primary expense the group has is transportation costs for the kids, although when we can, we like to provide healthy snacks so everyone has had more than a bag of Hot Cheetos to fuel their adventure.

A group of MBA alumni from Arizona State University that have an annual tradition of hiking the Grand Canyon Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim (47 miles and change… and a lot of elevation change!) are using their trip to raise money for this group. I appreciate these guys who feel they belong in the backcountry raising funds (and awareness) to help a new generation expand that pool of people who feel they belong there, too.

Want to kick in to support getting underserved youth outdoors in the Tucson area? Donate to their campaign: https://www.crowdrise.com/r2r2r2015/fundraiser/

And in somewhat a related note on representation in the outdoors community, for women who are annoyed that skis made for women’s sizes and shapes are often of lower performance aimed at intro-level skiers and snowboarders rather than the advanced and expert, check out this kickstarter of high performance skis and boards for women (sans the pink flowers, as a bonus!):

Fortunately, the observations I wrote about in January were made at the site of a long term experiment on the interactions of rodents and plants. Ecologists have collected thirty-eight years of data on rodent reproduction, along with systematic data on weather and plant life.

Base camp for the long term project started by Jim Brown in 1977.

Erica Christianson, a doctoral student at Utah State University, is studying these interactions at Portal as part of her dissertation work, and she crunched some of the numbers on reproduction and weather conditions (and generously allowed me to share them here!).

Erica’s main hypothesis, and one I wondered about in January, was that the large rainfall in the late summer and early fall last year resulted in more seeds available in early winter. With sufficient energy to stay warm and active during the winter, females could afford to breed.

A very quickly constructed scatterplot reveals that years with higher rainfall in the late summer and early fall do indeed have higher rates of female reproductive activity observed the following January:

You might notice a couple of things about this plot. First, you would be justified in pointing out that this is a correlation, and does not prove that the summer rain causes high January rodent reproduction. But it is consistent with a reasonable explanation for it.

You might imagine designing an experiment to test the causality more directly, in which all the plants are killed before they produces seeds after the next year with high summer rainfall. That would be an ambitious experiment on this landscape, involving a lot of person-hours with some herbicide or clippers, but it could be done.

You might also notice that fall precipitation does not perfectly predict female reproductive activity. Probably that interacts with several other factors. Ever noticed how you get hungrier in cold weather? Your body burns more calories to stay warm. (This is why mountaineers are advised to continue eating as much as possible if caught out overnight on a cold peak.) I suspect that if we also looked at the temperatures each winter, we might find that less rain is required in warmer winters to boost female reproduction, and the rainfall plus temperature would explain even more of the variation in reproductive activity. But that probably best left to future posts.

A lot of grass grew in the San Simon Valley following heavy late summer rains, providing substantial seed resources this winter.

I should also point out that these results are extremely preliminary. Typically, to have some confidence in a conclusion, the full description of the methods for data collection and analysis should be subjected to peer review – that is, at least three or more other experts will critique it before it is published. That’s definitely not how my blog works.

If you are interested in getting out in the field to collect data used in real long term and large scale research projects, check out iNaturalist, National Phenology Network, and the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. If you are in Tucson this weekend for the Tucson Festival of Books, visit Science City to meet some of these folks in person and pick up brochures for other Citizen Science opportunities as well!

One last photo: a cactus mouse (Peromyscus eremicus) that was released and immediately climbed the fence supposed to keep the rodents larger than that out. Let’s hope the kangaroo rats are less bold.

[Updated 3/17/15: I changed the label on the x axis of the grass from “Fall precip” to “late summer” to more accurately reflect how the plants seemed to respond to the rainfall and be more consistent with my text.]